Customer Reviews

CJKV Information Processing: Chinese, Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese Computing

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The previous edition of this book was so useful that I had two copies, one at work and one at home. I work in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and the previous edition, which only claimed to cover Japanese, was still the most useful book on Chinese and Korean info processing that I ever found. With this new edition, the author has extended coverage to all Asian languages that use Chinese characters, or used to do so in the case of Vietnamese, as part of their writing systems.

Thank goodness he has. The author, Ken Lunde, has an encyclopedic knowledge of this material. In addition, he is one of those people to whom anything less than strict, literal correctness is intolerable. Authors of this sort usually write in a style reminiscent of the federal tax code. Lunde manages to avoid this, creating one of those rare and delightful computer books that serve as a lucid tutorial the first time through, and as a strict and comprehensive reference thereafter.

The principal reason I consider this book the bible for Asian language information processing is the extreme difficulty of getting most of this information via any other source. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to think of another computer book whose original source material is as scattered, poorly documented, and often unreliable as that Lunde had to gather to produce this book. His job of ferreting out the details, cross-checking, error correction, and organization into a single book makes this almost a work of journalism. If you do CJKV work, you'll need more than just this book, of course, but the book is full of references to other material, so this is the place to start.

Lunde also provides a lot of usable source code in the book. This is not unusual in a computer book, but this code is special in two ways. First, it's available in C, Java, and Perl, not just in C. This is refreshing, given the increasingly prominent roles played by Java and Perl on the Internet--the place where multilingual computing arguably matters most.

Second, his code serves as a great checklist for what has to be done by any similar code. This is one of those difficult types of programming where many bugs aren't easy to see, because of the large number of obscure "gotchas" and arcane details. Lunde doesn't miss much, and he revels in these arcane details. His code is not highly optimized, and he admits as much, but if his code does something, you need to do it, and if it doesn't, you (probably) don't need to, either. This fact alone justifies the cost of the book for any developer to whom bugs might have financial consequences.

If you're going to do CJKV work, this is the bible. As I said, it's not the only thing you'll need, but it's where you should start.

This is an outstanding guide for English-speaking developers who must target Asian languages. For those of us who do not read or speak these languages, it tackles some of the scariest issues: different types of characters, when they are used, how they relate to each other, and how they are encoded in software.

Lunde's explanation of the structure and history of Asian written languages is fascinating reading in its own right.

If developing on the Windows platform, I would also recommend "Developing International Software for Windows 95 and Windows NT" by Nadine Kano (Microsoft Press). Lunde's book contains crucial background information regarding Asian character sets, as well as some general algorithms; the Kano book focuses on implementation details specific to the Windows environment.

Lunde's book is essential to anyone in the software localization or internationalization business. It simply covers everything. Want to know how to do regular expressions in Japanese? Page 445. The actual definition of "Mincho" (as in the Mincho font)? Check the Glossary. Postscript clones that handle Chinese? page 391.

The book is intended primarily for software engineers, but the subject matter is treated so comprehensively that it is an essential desk reference for translators, information developers, project managers, production managers, and marketing executives.

Just get it, Ok?

I've been trying to educate myself on international processing issues for a while now (including Programming for the World : A Guide to Internationalization by Sandra Martin O'Donnell) and CJKV is by far and away the best book on the subject. Although this is not a beginner's book on internationalization (for example, it doesn't completely address cultural issues on internationalization - O'Donnell's book is better at this), Ken Lunde's book is the clear reference on internationalization, and belongs on anyone's bookshelf who is producing software for the global market (that should be anyone who writes software!). Do not assume that this is only a book for Asian computing. It's a book about many of the issues you will face in creating global software. This is a very detailed book which lives up to its promise of educating, and informing anyone involved in global computing.

Buy it - and thoroughly read it!

Like all O'Reilly books - this book is well-written, and easy to digest. Kudos to Mr. Lunde for a great book, and to Tim O'Reilly for recognizing this need.

From this book I learnt (about 3 years ago) to add support for Japanese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) and Korean to a number of top-selling PC Games (plus support utils). The tables within it *are* useful, despite what other reviews have said, as a way of testing your onscreen output. I also found the author to be very helpful when I emailed him with the odd query , and he was encouraging when I shared my findings on Thai (not covered by this book, but principles learnt from it enabled me to work it out) with him. One of the best reference books I've got.

If you would like to start developing software that supports East Asian character sets, and do not know how to start, this tome is definitely for you. You will become familiar with historical background on writing systems, input and output methods. You will be aware of the modern encoding methods, font formats, typography, programming and code conversion techniques. Although this all is quite complicated, the author uses very friendly tone, and the information is easy to comprehend after all. The book has a marvelous glossary, index and bibliography sections. Although, for some readers, the lengthy printed character tables from appendixes may be helpful, I would have preferred the paper (and trees) would have been saved by not printing these tables. I think that the same tables in the electronic form would have given more value. Anyway, a programmer now has such tools as iconv library, which resolves most problems with conversion. But if you have only iconv and no knowledge on the East Asian background, you will not have enough confidence (and skills) to develop a proper software application. This book will demystify Chinese, Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese computing for you and will give you good start!

Truly the complete guide to the subject. As an introduction to Asian languages and their contents and usage this book as proved to be an excllent guide. From the streight forward and understandable explanination of the character and symbol sets to useful guidelines for implementation to the exhaustive list of characters and symbols. I don't see how you can try and deal with these language sets without using this book.

I learned an incredible amount from this book - not just about dealing with CJKV issues but about language, scripts, character sets, typography and more. This is an important book for anyone who wants to truly reach a large audience via software, be it on the web or desktop. Even if I'm not specifically targeting CJKV languages, there are a lot of principles here that can help keep software flexible and prepared for broader use down the road.

As someone who spent the majority of my IT career oblivious to anything beyond ascii this book has been a fantastic resource.

I've kept Ken Lunde's CJKV Information Processing with me as I worked on enabling softare in East Asian languages since it was JAPAN.INFO and downloadable from FTP servers in the late 1980s. There's no better place to find everything you need to know about the key technical issues when dealing with Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese. I've referred to it when building speech recognition, Web authoring and now Web browsing softare. The additional content in the Second Edition makes it well worth the upgrade from the first. Thanks Ken!

This book is an excellent guide to the pitfalls to avoid when doing software internationalization. Most books on the subject will warn you about the unwritten assumptions in coding for a single human language. This one also warns you about the many places you may be assuming that your characters are each 1 byte in length. Some of these are obvious enough, such as actual declarations. Some are subtler, such as regular expressions being one byte off in matching multibyte characters.

If you are involved in software internationalization, buy this book. Even if you aren't shipping a product to Asia yet, it will save you from writing code that is just to painful to modify for multibyte character sets.